Senior Success: Sreya Das Heading to JPMorgan for Cybersecurity

Sreya Das, graduating this spring with a bachelor's in computer science and is headed for the cybersecurity team at financial giant JPMorgan Chase, credits much of her success to involvement with activities outside the classroom.

Das joined so many NJIT student organizations and academic commitments that she practically lost count. "The number of activities she is successfully involved in is mind boggling. I call her superwoman," Ying Wu College of Computing Professor James Geller said.

On first glance, Das' technical commitments as a Highlander are what you might expect from her as an Albert Dorman Honors College student: becoming a Java teaching assistant for CS-113 after testing out of that course due to her high school experience, competing in the International Collegiate Programming Contest as a first-year student when most of the competitors were juniors and seniors, moving up to organize NJIT's teams in that competition which set records for their success and helping organize hackathons for the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Outside of school, Das spent summers interning at AT&T, Facebook and medical technology company Progentec Diagnostics. She said AT&T was enjoyable because it was her first internship, Facebook was exciting because it presented opportunities at a large Silicon Valley company, while Progentec gave her the widest exposure to programming languages such as Swift and Typescript, along with the Postgres database system.

Looking deeper reveals that Das, from the Morganville section of Marlboro, is more than an overachieving programmer. Her favorite extracurricular activities are writing, drawing and playing music. She joined the university's Nucleus yearbook for two years as a layout specialist, spent a few semesters playing flute and piano in the NJIT Jazz Band, but settled into her favorite group, The Vector student newspaper, during her first semester and ultimately served for several years as a writer, editor, photographer and designer.

"I've always loved writing … In high school I was involved with an organization called Curious Science Writers," Das explained. The role taught her to be prepared, she joked, in her first month on campus when she interviewed NJIT President Joel S. Bloom without knowing who he was.

Das attributed her dual interests to her parents. Her father works in network architecture, and her mother is a Highlander alumna who earned an M.S. in Professional and Technical Communication in 2003. She considered attending Northeastern University for a dual program in computer science and art, but chose NJIT because of her mother's endorsement along with the campus proximity and Albert Dorman Honors College scholarship.

She also said her advice to new students is to not spread yourself too thin. Doing so cost her other opportunities such as being unable to perform research. "I ended up not having the time to follow through and I didn't want to commit to something if I couldn't devote myself wholeheartedly … I do eventually want to go back to get my master's degree in computer science."

Faculty who influenced her include Mike Freidman and John Tsai, both Facebook engineers-in-residence. Das also cited Geller who served as a mentor, Fuad Hamidli from whom she learned about cybersecurity and Junilda Spirollari who allowed her to serve as a teaching assistant.